Iron Mike's meteoric rise, fall a reel-life melodrama

On June 27, 1988, I was there, hard by the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, bearing witness to the greatest human fighting machine put on this earth. Mike Tyson was meeting Michael Spinks for the heavyweight championship of the world, and it was electric.

Nothing – that's nothing – in sports can come close to matching the atmosphere of a major fight. There were enough volts and watts that night to light Paris.

But a whole lot of people missed it, never felt it. The fight was over when the two shook hands. It began at 11:30 p.m. It lasted 90 seconds. Spinks, no stiff, collapsed like an overweight 212-pound soufflé.

Never had I seen a fine fighter as alarmed as Spinks was on that New Jersey night. This was the young Tyson, the terrifying Tyson, Tyson the animal, Tyson the terrible, Tyson of the amazing hands, with the defense to make you miss.

Never was a man more suited for the ring, “Throwing punches,” as he puts it, “with the speed of the devil.”

And yet Tyson, a victim of his own demons, proved a volatile comet. With greatness came fame, which begat money, which begat excess, which begat drugs and alcohol, which begat laziness, which begat uncontrolled womanizing, which begat a rape conviction, which begat loneliness and confusion, which begat James Toback's compelling documentary, “Tyson,” which I watched yesterday morning at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas.

The film basically is an hour-and-a-half interview with Tyson of today, the humbled Tyson, the fallen idol, a person without direction. His is not a story born of ignorance, because Mike Tyson isn't stupid. Without navigation, he ran amok, basically reverting to his Brooklyn personality, only with millions in the bank, a bad entourage and an ever-growing insatiable lust for the opposite sex.

“I was intrigued with sex,” he says. “My mother was promiscuous. . . . I like a strong woman; I want to dominate her sexually.”

The documentary is interspersed with scenes from the fighter's broken, troubled youth as a street thug and thief in Brooklyn; to his happy pugilistic education under famed trainer Cus D'Amato, who pulled Tyson out of jail into his Catskills mansion; to his rise as the youngest heavyweight champion (through exquisitely brutal fight footage); to his imprisonment for rape and historic collapse against Buster Douglas; to his ill-fated partnerships with promoter Don King (“He'd kill his mother for a dollar”) and wife Robin Givens (“I was being a pig; she didn't like that”); to his pathetic, desperate ear-chewing of Evander Holyfield; to what he is in 2009: a vulnerable, broken 42-year-old man, basically broke.

Toback obviously has a rapport with Tyson few people have had, but this film verifies what many of us who followed the sweet science back then knew: that when D'Amato passed away in 1985, he figuratively took the Mike Tyson he alone had created into the grave with him.

“I was crying and crying and crying,” says Tyson, who sobs during the film. “I was hysterical. I lost my whole life. I didn't know where to go. I was 19 years old. I was scared. I felt vulnerable and lonely, naked to the world.”